Altar for the Past serves as a cabinet of curiosity about memories in the shape of the Santa Maria del Fiore cathedral. During my semester abroad in Florence, I was a tour guide at the duomo until my time abruptly ended due to the pandemic. The pandemic and recent personal events frantically unraveled material and immaterial possessions I took for granted, which inspired me to focus on memory and loss. Even before the pandemic, the Duomo served as a place for grief and consolation for me.
Items are lost forever and events pass by without us being able to properly process what happened. Recreating the place I once regularly inhabited a lifetime ago, the Altar for the Past houses a collection of abstracted scenes from my memory.
I only started learning Rhino a semester before making this. Altering a preexisting file online didn’t make sense for me so I modeled the whole thing from scratch.
Working with a printer bed that’s roughly 8x8 inches in dimension, the entire structure had to be divided into pieces. A total of 63 pieces were printed and assembled with tension pins.
[ THANKS TO ]
Because I came up with the idea at the very last minute I was basically laying down the train tracks as the train went on. I adjusted the printing density from 10~20% accordingly to cut down time, and at one point used all 6 printers at the same time to print this.
Assuming that I used a 20% density setting for all parts, the entire project would have taken about 27 days and 6 hours, using about 5km of filament in total.
